Oral Care products that coat tooth surfaces can provide stain prevention, protection from bacterial and food acids, and a sensorial benefit of tooth slickness or perception surface smoothness.
Prevention of dental caries by coating a tooth with a casein phosphopeptide-amorphous calcium phosphate complex was disclosed in US Pub. No. 2011/0076241. Though they were able to show tooth coating, they had to deliver the material from a water-free composition, thus imposing a barrier to delivery from a toothpaste. In the presence of water, they were unable to deliver a stable film to the tooth's surface and thus were required to have a non-aqueous composition.
Coating the teeth with an antimicrobial varnish (U.S. Pat. No. 4,883,534, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,496,322) or preventative resin has been a means to combat dental caries by a variety of technologies, such as shellac resin (U.S. Pat. No. 6,524,559) or a methacrylate resin to repair caries lesions (U.S. Pat. No. 5,430,074). The inventions related to these coating compositions have to be delivered from a solvent based system that is brushed on, where the resin is the residual after the solvent dries.
For aesthetic purposes, teeth have been coated with reactive glass ionomers (U.S. Pat. No. 6,036,494) or etching the teeth to deliver a non-removable polymer (U.S. Pat. No. 4,512,743). A coating composition is needed that can be added to oral care products, so the composition can be applied to the teeth during a user's normal oral care product usage.